Fedora is a leading-edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months. Fedora 16 brings exciting new features for desktop users, for system administrators, and for developers. Highlights of these features can be found below. If the mere mention of Fedora 16 is all you need, download options can be found at:

Contents

Dedication

During the preparation of Fedora 16, the computing world lost one of its great contributors: Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie co-invented Unix and the C language. He also co-authored The C Programming Language, a book that taught many programmers just at the time personal computing was exploding. Without Ritchie computing would be nothing like it is today.

A humble man, not well-known outside his field, Dennis will always be remembered by those of us who practice the craft. Thank you, Dennis.

What's New in Fedora 16?

For desktop users

A journey to the center of the desktop:

GNOME 3.2, the latest update to the most popular desktop environment, brings new features, including:

System Settings gains an "Online Accounts" panel, which provides a central point for managing online accounts like Google, Facebook, etc.

A new contact management application is integrated with Empathy, Evolution and the new "Online Accounts" settings panel

A new document management application provides a simpler alternative to traditional file management for both local and "in-cloud" documents.

KDE 4.7, the most recent version of this feature-rich desktop environment, brings substantial updates, including:

A new shutdown dialog allows users with multiple operating systems to select the OS to boot next.

For developers

Twenty thousand lines in C:

Perl 5.14, a new version of Perl, brings many enhancements, including Unicode 6.0 support.

GCC Python Plugins extend GCC with Python 2 and 3, without dealing with the C internals of GCC.

D2: Fedora 16 is the first Linux distribution to include the newest version of D, a systems programming language combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages such as Ruby and Python.

For system administrators

New system account ID numbering: Fedora 16 starts user IDs at 1000, providing more room for system accounts and making it easier for administrators not have services run as root. This improves interoperability with other Linux distributions that start user IDs at 1000.

Chrony: Chrony provides network time protocol (NTP) client and server pieces which are more tolerant of unstable clocks and Internet connections which are not always on.

Fedora 16 provides locking of virtual disks to prevent a disk being used by multiple virtual machines simultaneously.

Cloud goodies galore:

Aeolus, a cross-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, which consists of a web-based user interface and tools for managing cloud instances across heterogenous clouds.

OpenStack, another IaaS platform, which takes form as a collection of services for setting up and running a cloud compute and storage infrastructure.

Pacemaker-cloud, which provides application service high availability for cloud environments.

HekaFS, a cloud-ready version of GlusterFS, which extends the filesystem to be suitable for deployment by a cloud provider by adding in stronger authentication and authorization, encryption, and multi-tenancy.

This is only a taste of what is included in Fedora 16. A more detailed list can be found at:

Fedora Spins

Contributing

There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can help translate software and content, test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit documentation, design and do artwork, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit http://join.fedoraproject.org today!